Making Both Ends Meet eBook

These chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work
on the fortunes of some self-supporting operatives
and hand workers in New York factories and workshops,
concern only one corner of American industry, in which,
as every observer must realize, there are many other
enormous fields of seasonal work. These histories
are nevertheless clear and authentic instances of
a strange and widespread social waste. Neither
trade organization nor State legislation for shorter
hours is primarily directed toward a more general
regular and foresighted distribution of work among
all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers.
Until some focussed, specific attempt is made to secure
such a distribution, it seems impossible but that
extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness, will
be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime
or exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner
apparently arranged by fortune to devastate human
energy in the least intelligent manner possible.

Further effects of speeding and of monotony in this
labor were described by other self-supporting factory
workers whose chronicles, being also concerned with
industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed
next.

[Illustration: Photograph by Lewis Hine

“Inquiring, tireless,
seeking what is yet unfound;—­
But where is what
I started for so long ago,
And why is it
still unfound?”

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: The income and outlay of other
cloak makers will be separately presented.]

[Footnote 21: In the first report of the New
York Probation Association the statement is made that
out of 300 girls committed by the courts during the
year to the charge of Waverley House, 72 had been engaged
in factory work. Of these many had been at one
time or other employed as operatives. On questioning
the probation worker, Miss Stella Miner, who had lived
with them and knew their stories most fully, it was
learned, however, that almost every one of these girls
had gone astray while they were little children, had
been remanded by courts to the House of the Good Shepherd,
where they had learned machine operating, and on going
out of its protection to factories had drifted back
again to their old ways of life. How far their
early habit and experience had dragged these young
girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known.
The truth remains that factory work, when it is seasonal,
must increase temptation by its economic pressure.]

CHAPTER IV

THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY-WORKERS

[Monotony and Fatigue in Speeding]

One of the strangest effects of the introduction of
machinery into industry is that instead of liberating
the human powers and initiative of workers from mechanical
drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and warp
these forces to the functions of machines.[22]